Deathless

Nobody talked. They breathed into their scarves and lugged and lugged. But no one was left to bury anyone else, so people just left the sleds in a pile by the cemetery gate. That’s where we left Sofiya, with Kseniya lying over her like a flower, with snow piling up on her hair. I said them a domovoi’s mass, but no one heard me because grief is louder than praying.

By the window that night, Marya Morevna said to me, I think I have finally found my home, for everyone I love is here.

Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.

Koschei is below me, and Ivan above. And out in the snow, everything has gone silver, and there is Madame Lebedeva making jelly with her lipstick, and Zemlehyed minding the linden trees, and Naganya down on the frozen river, pouring gasoline into her mouth so her trigger does not freeze. And you, and Kseniya Yefremovna, and little Sofiya. We are all together, at last.

I looked out the window where she had looked for months stitched back to back. And there in the dark glowed silver wounds in the street where another Leningrad bled through: another Neva, another Dzerzhinskaya Street, all splashed with silver. And there walked a woman with swan feathers in her hair, vanishing around a corner; and there walked a short, fat creature with dead leaves on his head; and there walked a woman like a gun. And there walked Kseniya, too, her chest stained and shimmering, holding baby Sofiya’s hand as the child jumped and tried to catch the silver balloons drifting just out of her reach.

Mamochka, she cried. So many!

In the middle of them all came walking like a kommissar a man with eyelids so long they brushed the snow out of his path, wearing a silver brocade and a silver crown. And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.

* * *

The shoulder blades of Marya Morevna touched behind her back, and the knees of Ivan Nikolayevich banged together in front of his belly. Icicles grew inside the house. Together they pulled down the wallpaper to get at the paste, and then they boiled the wallpaper to make bread. They were all mouth and bone, and their eyes slipped gears whenever they tried to meet. They ate their bread with paisley and flowers on the crust, and smeared paste on it like butter. Bread had never been bread, and butter had never been butter. They could not remember such things.

“The Germans have printed invitations to a gala ball at the Hotel Astoria,” Ivan Nikolayevich whispered, as though anyone but me might overhear him. “They will serve whole pigs, and a hundred thousand potatoes, and a cake that weighs five hundred pounds. I have seen the invitation myself. Embossed in gold ink, with a red ribbon. They say, ‘Leningrad is empty. We are only waiting for the crows to tidy things up a bit before the party.’”

I don’t believe you, said my Marya. She is so stubborn her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat. I know. I raised her, I did.

When you are hungry, a whisper is a shout. “Whore! I will let them have you, and they will roast you on a spit with their suckling pig. What do you keep in the basement?”

You promised, Ivanushka.

“Fuck your promises. You are keeping food from me down there, I know it. Devil bitch. Kulak goat-wife.”

You promised, Ivanushka.

“Promises to the devil’s woman are no promises! No court would hold me! You are hoarding food, and you put a spell on me, in Irkutsk! Why else would I want a sack like you?”

I hid behind the stove. Marriage bears few witnesses.

You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.

When you are hungry, a step is a shove. Ivan hobbled to the basement door, and, well, he was a fool. Hasn’t he always been? You can’t blame a fool for his thick head. Why else was he born, but to blunder and buffoon and once a year make a black-haired girl laugh? Look, I am holding up my two hands, and between them is the old, dear house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, and between them is Marya Morevna and her husband, mad with hunger like a cow, and between them is Koschei the Deathless looking up from the darkness. He is smiling down there, and his smile has two edges.

“Who’s down there?” Ivan said, though he knew already.

I am so thirsty, Comrade.

“Who is it?” Ivan peered down, his eyes searching for pickled eggs, for cherry preserves, for a jug of beer, for every good thing a cellar might have.

I am so hungry, Comrade.

And Ivan went down because he was a fool, and because it could not be only Koschei she kept from him. All winter he had tortured himself with dreams of the food she was hiding, and it must be there, it must, or else he was worse than a fool.

Will you not give me a little water, Ivan Nikolayevich? Koschei said.

Ivan’s dry body could not weep, so he borrowed on the tears of his future, so that Koschei could see his grief, and there could be no confusion.

“Why can’t you leave us alone? Get out, get out, old man; leave us in peace.”

I would be glad to, only I am so weak. No one should relent just because my Papa smiles.

So the fool loosened Koschei’s ropes, and gave him water from a filthy, half-frozen puddle. Marya Morevna watched it all from the top of the stairs, and her black hair hung all around her; and I was there, so I saw him roar up toward her, and I can tell you now that she looked at the two of them with crow’s eyes and said, Yes, Kostya. Take me. Take me.

* * *